Documentation Station Implementation Guide
It doesn’t matter how great your documentation station if it’s not positioned, or “framed” in the right way. Otherwise, your documentation station will just be sitting in the corner collecting dust. On that note, let’s address a few questions to consider as you think about setting up a documentation station and how to best leverage it for your makerspace!
1)Why would an instructor want a documentation station in their space?
Documentation has intrinsic benefits including encouraging reflection and self-critiquing, and fostering a sense of pride and appreciation for one’s work- even if project did not turn out exactly as envisioned! In engineering and design practice, much communication and collaboration (both peer to peer, and student to adult) is aided through photos, sketches, etc. Encouraging this practice is important for students, whether they plan on pursuing “making” in the future or not, as they hone their skills in collaboration, communication, and organization.
2)How can it be used in an educational makerspace?
Capturing a snapshot of ideas or the physical artifact itself is helpful in terms of being able to share projects (i.e. class presentations or even from a marketing standpoint), building student portfolios, and tutorials. In some instances, teachers may find it helpful for assessment as well.
The documentation station can be used both in an open-ended way or complement a more structured activity, perhaps where documentation is part of the end assessment. For instance, an instructor could require that each group takes x amount of photos, or must capture moments at the ideation phase, testing phase, finished product, etc. or simply tell students it is there to use at their own will. Here are a couple examples can be seen below, where the photo on the left demonstrates how prompts can be used by the instructor to get the students thinking about certain aspects of their design whereas the photo right shows a group capturing their work in progress.
Prompted responses Physical project in the making
3)How do I make students or users see the need for documentation?
Some students will find the process of documentation helpful without any prompting or encouragement; some reported it helped them step back from their project during moments of frustration and helped them gather their thoughts, it made them appreciate their progress when looking back upon their project, etc. However, for those who don’t naturally see the benefits, some outlet to share their documentation (whether it’s assessed or not) can be helpful. Below are two examples of meaningful uses of documentation content. On the left, each group in a 5th grade project based classroom had to make a “scrapbook page” to contribute to the class engineering scrapbook, and to the right, makers in a LEGO-centric educational play center were eager to have their work shared on the center’s facebook page.
“Scrapbooking” about their project Imagination Station Facebook Photo Gallery